Hi,It seems that a large terabyte hard drive would take a very long time to defrag. Is there a method one can use that would shorten the defrag time and if so, what is it?

Would this work? Putting partitions on the hard drive and only defrag the partitions the are used a lot. Is there a defrag program that just defrags a selected partition, if so, what is the name of the program?

Dede wrote:Hi,It seems that a large terabyte hard drive would take a very long time to defrag. Is there a method one can use that would shorten the defrag time and if so, what is it?

Would this work? Putting partitions on the hard drive and only defrag the partitions the are used a lot. Is there a defrag program that just defrags a selected partition, if so, what is the name of the program?

Thanks

I use Auslogics defrag for my hard disks. I have a 1TB disk that I defrag every once in a while. Doesn't take long. No need to split it into partitions unless you absolutely have to for another reason.

Dede wrote:Hi,It seems that a large terabyte hard drive would take a very long time to defrag. Is there a method one can use that would shorten the defrag time and if so, what is it?

Would this work? Putting partitions on the hard drive and only defrag the partitions the are used a lot. Is there a defrag program that just defrags a selected partition, if so, what is the name of the program?

Thanks

Windows Vista or Windows 7 and then put manual defragging out of your mind... forever.

"Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends. We're so glad you could attend. Come inside! Come inside!"

Best defragger, bar none, IMHO is Raxco PerfectDisk. Not free, but it works extremely well.

It may take several hours for the initial defrag, but it will finish it if you let it (unlike Diskeeper, which seems to take many passes). The buit-in Windows defragger is just a stripped-down version of Diskeeper.

Buub wrote:Best defragger, bar none, IMHO is Raxco PerfectDisk. Not free, but it works extremely well.

It may take several hours for the initial defrag, but it will finish it if you let it (unlike Diskeeper, which seems to take many passes). The buit-in Windows defragger is just a stripped-down version of Diskeeper.

Ditto. Defragging a drive nowadays doesn't have the same effect as it used to, as NTFS is much better at housekeeping, but even then, a defrag every few months (assuming heavy use) is quite noticeable. May be and likely is moot with SSDs though.

There is a fixed amount of intelligence on the planet, and the population keeps growing :(

MyDefrag can set up scheduled defrags on installation. It'll run a quick defrag daily and a long defrag monthly as long as the computer's on; if you're running Win7 or Vista you'll have to turn off UAC or manually approve each launch, though. However, those versions of Windows automatically schedule defrags with their built-in utilities anyway, so there's probably no need.

I've got a 1.5TB hard drive and only defrag it every few months. Doesn't seem worthwhile to do it more often, even to do it overnight when I'm not using it.

morphine wrote:Ditto. Defragging a drive nowadays doesn't have the same effect as it used to, as NTFS is much better at housekeeping, but even then, a defrag every few months (assuming heavy use) is quite noticeable.

Agreed. NTFS isn't nearly as affected by fragmentation as FAT/FAT32, but an occasional defrag is still beneficial.

For XP systems I run a defrag whenever I do a general housecleaning (remove the inevitable outdated versions of Java, install latest patches for all apps, clean out wreckage from uninstalled apps, full virus scan, etc.). Nothing fancy; I generally just run 2-3 passes of the built-in defragger.

The absolute *best* way to defrag a data drive is to copy the entire contents to another drive, reformat the original partition, then copy everything back again. Not with an imaging tool (this would copy the fragmentation as well); you need to do a file copy (i.e. just select everything in the top level folder of the drive and drag it to the destination drive). This of course means you need to have a large scratch drive in an external enclosure with a fast interface (eSATA or USB 3.0); but such drives are quite affordable these days.

The Linux filesystem guys claim that ext2/3/4 isn't affected by fragmentation, and that's why they've never bothered to create an official Linux filesystem defrag tool. I don't completely buy this claim, but it does seem to be close enough to true that it doesn't matter much in the majority of use cases. For drives that have been heavily used with lots of small files being created and deleted, occasional use of the "copy out, copy back" method described above is adequate.

morphine wrote:May be and likely is moot with SSDs though.

For SSDs TRIM support is what you need. Doing a traditional defrag on a SSD is just going to waste your SSD's write cycles, for little or no performance gain.

The years just pass like trains. I wave, but they don't slow down.-- Steven Wilson

just brew it! wrote:The absolute *best* way to defrag a data drive is to copy the entire contents to another drive, reformat the original partition, then copy everything back again.

For small values of "best". That's a lot of work for not much gain vs traditional techniques.

The Linux filesystem guys claim that ext2/3/4 isn't affected by fragmentation, and that's why they've never bothered to create an official Linux filesystem defrag tool.

Not really; it's just not affected as much as a simple fs like FAT. One of ext4's features is extents, which is basically used to reduce fragmentation. There are unofficial ext2 defraggers (won't work with ext3 or 4) and allegedly there's ongoing work on creating an ext4 defragger.

just brew it! wrote:The absolute *best* way to defrag a data drive is to copy the entire contents to another drive, reformat the original partition, then copy everything back again.

For small values of "best". That's a lot of work for not much gain vs traditional techniques.

It is "best" in the sense that it reduces fragmentation to zero in a single pass, and works on any filesystem (even ones that don't support defraggers like ext4).

And while it *is* more work than running a traditional defragger, it isn't *much* work, assuming you've got a spare external drive you can use. For a home system, start the copy-out when you go to bed, and the copy-back when you leave for work in the morning. By the time you get home in the evening it's done, and you've spent maybe 5 minutes (10 tops if you had to search for the external hard drive that's been buried under a pile of crap in the family room) of your time on it. I suppose if you're the anal-retentive type who wants to defrag the disk on a weekly basis, yeah it could get tedious... but I generally defrag only when I notice a slowdown, or when I'm doing other periodic maintenance on the system.

The years just pass like trains. I wave, but they don't slow down.-- Steven Wilson

Buub wrote:Best defragger, bar none, IMHO is Raxco PerfectDisk. Not free, but it works extremely well.

It may take several hours for the initial defrag, but it will finish it if you let it (unlike Diskeeper, which seems to take many passes). The buit-in Windows defragger is just a stripped-down version of Diskeeper.

Mydefrag is handy if you are a bit more technical (and it's also free.) With mydefrag you have the options of how you want to defrag and what you want to defrag. You can even script your own version. For instance I have a disk that I use for storing media files as well as for temporary downloads. So I wrote up a little script that I run periodically that moves all of the temp files to the end of the drive and the does a fast fill on the media files. With the Fast Fill option the program looks for enough free space to hold one of the files to be sorted. If it finds enough contiguous space then it fills it. If there isn't enough contiguous space then it won't defrag that file.

That means it won't be as effective as the standard defrag option but it finishes quickly. Given that the drive is just media files there isn't as much of an issue with fragmentation as there would be if the drive stored lots of smaller files that were regularly updated.

As for your comment about folders versus partitions I tend to agree with what you wrote. For most uses it's better to have a large partition and separate things into folders. There are certain cases where there isn't true (huge numbers of small files or lots of temporary data being updated all the time) but those issues aren't seen by the normal user so for most people it's best to make a drive into a single partition. (Though I might suggest even a normal user could get by with formatting a 4TB drive into a couple of partitions, should he/she be so lucky as to have one. )

With the built-in defragger of Vista and 7 I really don't see the need to concern yourself with this. They keep fragmentation pretty low, and if I ever noticed them defragging, it was when the system was idle and it stopped as soon as I touched the mouse. Any tiny performance edge you might get out of manually defragging is offset by the time (and even money) you spend researching, installing, testing and running the software. The only reason I can think of is if you need to be absolutely positive that something like a video recording hard drive will have 100% of its performance 100% of the time.

I agree that the built in defragger for Win7/Vista is all the typical person needs. In an era of automatic defragging and NTFS, paying for a defragging program feels like a really silly thing to do. Defraggler is a good, free program if you really feel the need to go above and beyond the call, but your actual performance gain will probably be unnoticable.

Never defrag an SSD. Windows 7 actually turns off the automatic defragger for any SSD drives you have plugged in. Defragging is only a worry because of the physical nature of HDDs, as the head has to read over a larger area of the platter to retrieve its information. SSDs do not have this worry since there are no moving parts. Defragging an SSD does far more harm than anything else, as you rapidly burn through its limited read/write amount in doing so.

Firestarter wrote:With the built-in defragger of Vista and 7 I really don't see the need to concern yourself with this. They keep fragmentation pretty low, and if I ever noticed them defragging, it was when the system was idle and it stopped as soon as I touched the mouse. Any tiny performance edge you might get out of manually defragging is offset by the time (and even money) you spend researching, installing, testing and running the software. The only reason I can think of is if you need to be absolutely positive that something like a video recording hard drive will have 100% of its performance 100% of the time.

Vista & Win7 automatically schedule a weekly defrag event for HDDs. On Win7, I believe it starts at 1am Wednesday assuming the system is up at the time, not sure about Vista.

WinXP of course still has the barebones version of DiskKeeper Lite that was integrated with Win2k but AFAIK it can only be invoked manually, not scheduled.

EsotericLord wrote:While this is true, Win 7 will also automatically defrag when the computer is idle should it miss that 1am Wednesday schedule.

How idle is "idle"? I have an HDD-based laptop that is never up Wednesday mornings, and in fact only runs during the weekends typically. Although it is sometimes idle for an hour or two, the level of disk fragmentation seems to be creeping upward (only checked it a couple times out of curiosity but did see 12% recently).

just brew it! wrote:It's like refusing to buy a really nice shirt because the color fades if you wash it 10 times a day, every day for a month!

In fact, it's like refusing to buy a really nice shirt that never gets dirty and is in no way improved by washing, just because if you wash it a ridiculous number of times the color fades. There are all sorts of products that don't work right or fail early if you abuse them; the people who happily buy and use them just know to avoid that abuse.

Edit: and I should add, it's not like hard drives last forever either (nor, I suspect, would continuously defragging them help with their MTBF)

Last edited by UberGerbil on Tue Feb 14, 2012 10:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.

just brew it! wrote:It is "best" in the sense that it reduces fragmentation to zero in a single pass, and works on any filesystem (even ones that don't support defraggers like ext4).

Eh, Raxco Perfectdisk will bring it to zero in a single pass too, consolidation and all (except for locked system files but that's a given). Faster too since it's unlikely to have to move every single file.

Still, unless you're on an XP machine, you don't really have to worry about this nowadays.